Back in 2007 Ken Rudin, CEO of the early stage SaaS BI start-up called LucidEra (and former Siebel employee) was asked about the cloud announcement from Business Objects (before they were acquired by SAP). He made a number of observations about the challenges enterprise software companies face when it comes to transitioning to the cloud. Here’s the interview.

Today, Dave Kellogg wrote a great post about Oracle’s series of cloud announcements this week. I’ve re-blogged it here.

Oracle missed their fourth quarter targets, for the third time in seven quarters, with many observers worried that cloud missteps were a root cause. Buying Sun when the world was going cloud was a rare Oracle zig when the market zagged. To take Wall Street’s eyes off the 4Q miss, Ellison promised some startling announcements in the coming week, a great diversion if there ever was one.

Oracle then announced a nine-year strategic partnership whereby Salesforce will continue to run its technical operations on Oracle’s database, purchase Financial/ERP and HCM software from Oracle (presumably dropping its existing Workday implementation), and the two companies…